Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Face of Water
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://sarahruden.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.writersreps.com/Sarah-Ruden * http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/roddreher/2010/02/the-iconoclastic-sarah-ruden.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 96056854
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n96056854
HEADING: Ruden, Sarah
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372 __ |a Classical literature |a Poetry |2 lcsh
373 __ |a Harvard University |a John Hopkins Writing Seminars |a Yale University |a University of Cape Town |a Yale University. Divinity School |a Brown University
374 __ |a Poets |a Translators |a Essayists |a Classicists |2 lcsh
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670 __ |a Other places, 1995: |b t.p. (Sarah Ruden) p. 4 of cover (lecturer, Dept. of Classics, Univ. of Cape Town; Ph.D., Harvard)
670 __ |a Petronius Arbiter. Satyricon, 2000: |b CIP t.p. (Sarah Ruden) data sheet (b. Dec. 2, 1962)
670 __ |a Sarah Ruden website, April 30, 2014: |b home page (Sarah Ruden was born in rural Ohio and raised in the United Methodist Church. She is a “convinced Friend” or Quaker convert of twenty years’ standing. She holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town, and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow, and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University. She is a poet, translator, essayist, and popularizer of Biblical linguistics) |u http://sarahruden.com/
953 __ |a lh07 |b lh38
PERSONAL
Born December 2, 1962, in OH; married.
EDUCATION:University of Michigan, B.A.; Johns Hopkins University, M.A.; Harvard University, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Poet, translator, and writer. Yale University, New Haven, CT, scholar in residence at Divinity School; Brown University, Providence, RI, visiting scholar in classics. Former teacher of Latin, English, and writing at Harvard University and University of Cape Town; South African Education and Environment Project, former tutor.
AWARDS:Literary Award, South African Central News Agency, 1996, for Other Places; Whiting creative nonfiction grant; Guggenheim fellow, 2010.
RELIGION: Society of Friends (Quakers).WRITINGS
Contributor to national magazines, including National Review, and to religious periodicals.
SIDELIGHTS
Sarah Ruden informed Rod Dreher in a Beliefnet interview: “I make my living through writing and editing.” Free from any obligations to an academic institution, she explained, “I’m blessed beyond hope in being able to write anything I like.” What she likes to write are poems, essays, and translations of both biblical and pagan literature. Ruden also likes to correct (what are in her opinion) misinterpretations and mistranslations of ancient works in ways that routinely mislead contemporary readers.
Ruden is highly regarded for the depth and integrity of her scholarship. She earned a doctorate in classical philology from Harvard University and spent three years as a scholar in residence at Yale Divinity School. Some of Ruden’s pagan subject matter, coming as it does from a woman raised in the United Methodist Church and converted to the Society of Friends (Quakers), might raise the eyebrows of a conservative Christian. Ruden reminded Dreher: “To ‘walk orderly’ as a Quaker is to appreciate the feelings of people who disagree with you.” As a scholar, she looks behind the words of modern translations to investigate what the original words meant in historical times much different than our own.
Paul among the People
One of the most disagreeable people to some Christians is the apostle Paul, whose virulent polemics against homosexuality and women have alienated him from many of the faithful. In fact, Ruden once told National Review contributor John Wilson: “I kept Paul in a pen out back.” She came to realize, Dreher wrote, “that Paul gets a bad deal from contemporaries who judge him by the standards of our own time.” Ruden corrects the record in Paul among the People: The Apostle Paul Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time.
Ruden points out that, in Paul’s time, a homosexual was an adult man who sodomized young boys. Pedophilia was not only widespread, but often brutally sadistic; not only accepted, but praiseworthy if sufficiently spectacular. In the case of women, Ruden explains, arranged marriages for monetary gain and sexual exploitation for carnal satisfaction were also widespread in Greek and Roman society. She argues that Paul’s insistence on celibacy and abstinence represented, not misogyny, but a plea for replacing sexual desire with a more abstract love for the living God.
Critics appreciated the balanced tone of Ruden’s analysis. Dreher observed: “What makes reading Ruden such a pleasure, aside from the quality of her thinking and her prose, is her willingness to question settled truths, and to do it with such a lightness of spirit.” Wilson wrote: “In an uncanny way, her book is animated by the apostle’s [own] style: his urgency, his argumentative agility, his bluntness, his exasperation, his vision of great felicity.” The critic summarized: “This is an act of literary sorcery: white magic, of which not even Paul himself could disapprove.”
The Face of Water
Ruden’s scholarship profits from her skills as a translator. She studied classical languages and taught Latin. Conversely, her linguistic, literary, and historical research, combined with the sensibilities of a published poet and the convictions of a devoted Christian, all add depth to her translations.
In The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible Ruden offers readers a new look at biblical passages that, she posits, got lost in translation. She uses her scholarship to plumb the hidden meanings within words and phrases and employs poetic imagery to convey the lyricism of the original texts. She leverages a combination of both to present fresh versions of passages repeatedly hackneyed by one-dimensional translations. Brian Sullivan reported in Library Journal: “Each passage is gorgeously retranslated … in an effort to recapture some of its lost beauty and significance.”
“Paul’s language wasn’t just Greek,” she shared with Garrett Brown at Note and Query, “it was also rhetoric, the play of sounds and ideas. … Since we moderns … habitually condemn whatever’s ‘rhetorical,’ we lose many heights and depths and angles of Paul.” Regarding the status of the so-called “living Bible,” Ruden told him that “the Bible seems a victim of its own success.” She would instead “propose considering the book in itself, as an amazing book … a supremely beautiful work.” A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that “Ruden’s work emphasizes the complexity inherent in translation” and adds “fresh insights into even the most familiar stories.”
Other Misunderstood Literary Giants
Ruden’s translations cast new light on a wide range of literary classics. At one end of the spectrum is The Golden Ass by Apuleius, who lived in the Roman Empire between 125 and 170 A.D. This is the ribald story of a man named Lucius, whose experiments with magic turn him into a donkey. His quest for the magical antidote leads him from one X-rated adventure to another. “The only Latin novel that’s come down to us intact,” commented Elizabeth Hand in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, “featured scenes of unrelenting drunkenness, debauchery, cruelty,” which, she claimed, “has a lot more in common with South Park, Jackass, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and John Waters’s entire oeuvre than you might imagine.”
Eventually Lucius is saved by his humility and submission to the will of the almighty, who in this case is the goddess Isis. “Much of the joy of this translation hums under the hood,” wrote Tracy Lee Simmons in his National Review assessment, “by aiming for tone over rigid accuracy.” Thanks to Ruden, “a consummate classical scholar,” according to Simmons, “The Golden Ass reminds us abundantly that for all their accrued sapience, the ancients could be marvelously, side-splittingly ridiculous. One reads this … for the sheer, unabashed fun of it.”
At the other end of the spectrum is Ruden’s translation of the Confessions of St. Augustine. In contrast to Apuleius, she told Brown, “there’s a great deal to admire in Augustine but little to like.” Much, but not all, of the blame falls on “centuries of doctrinal, orthodox Christian interpretations,” she confided to Elizabeth Bruenig in the magazine America: Jesuit Review, which are “plodding, dry and distant from both the poetic whimsy and rudimentary faith of their author.”
Ruden acknowledges that Augustine was an intellectual who wanted nothing more than to study and to pray. When thrust into a leadership role, he accepted it, eventually with passion, but he yearned for the silence and solitude of the monastery. Ruden also concedes to Brown that Augustine’s “attitude toward women … really is exasperating,” but it was only after a lengthy domestic relationship that he retreated into the celibate lifestyle for which he is remembered.
The Ruden translation represents an attempt to restore an element of vivacity to a memoir that was for centuries mired in stultifying theological didacticism. Bruenig observed: “Ruden’s Augustine is a dreamer, an artist, a poet.” A Publishers Weekly contributor summarized: “In this lively translation filled with vivid, personal prose, Ruden introduces readers to a saint whom many will realize they only thought they knew.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2010, Ray Olson, review of Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, p. 10.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible.
Library Journal, January 1, 2017, Brian Sullivan, review of The Face of Water, p. 105.
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May-June, 2013, Elizabeth Hand, review of The Golden Ass, p. 41.
National Review, April 5, 2010, John Wilson, review of Paul among the People, p. 50; March 19, 2012, Tracy Lee Simmons, review of The Golden Ass, p. 45.
Publishers Weekly, January 9, 2017, review of The Face of Water, p. 62; April 10, 2017, review of Confessions, p. 68.
ONLINE
America: Jesuit Review, https://www.americamagazine.org/ (August 21, 2017), Elizabeth Bruenig, review of Confessions.
Beliefnet, http://www.beliefnet.com/ (October 18, 2017), Rod Dreher, author interview.
Note and Query, https://noteandquery.com/ (June 5, 2017), Garrett Brown, author interview.
Sarah Ruden Website, http://sarahruden.com (October 18, 2017).
Stonehill College Website, http://www.stonehill.edu/ (October 18, 2017), author profile.
Writers Reps, http://www.writersreps.com/ (October 18, 2017), author profile.
Home
A Selection of Poems
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Sarah Ruden
About Sarah
Author & Poet
Sarah Ruden, Author & Poet
Sarah Ruden was raised in the United Methodist Church and is a “convinced Friend” or Quaker convert. She holds a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University and an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has taught Latin, English, and writing at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Cape Town, and has been a tutor for the South African Education and Environment Project, an education-enrichment nonprofit in Cape Town. She was a scholar in residence for three years at Yale Divinity School and a Guggenheim fellow, and is now a visiting scholar at Brown University. In the fall of 2016, she received the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her work on Augustine’s Confessions.
She is a poet, translator, essayist, and popularizer of Biblical linguistics. A collection of her poetry, Other Places (William Waterman Publications, 1995, later distributed by HarperCollins) won the South African Central News Agency Literary Award, and her poems appear in The National Review and religious periodicals. She made use of her experience in publishing several book-length translations of pagan literature to write Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Pantheon, 2010). Her translation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia is part of The Greek Plays, a Modern Library collection (2016). The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible (Pantheon) and Augustine’s Confessions: A New Translation (The Modern Library) both appeared in early 2017. She has begun a new translation of the Gospels for The Modern Library, taking into account linguistic, literary, and historical research that has been poorly represented in standard translations.
Her literary agent is Gail Hochman at Brandt and Hochman.
Gospels Translation Preview
The Bible—What About It?
About Sarah
Books by Sarah
Gospels Translation Preview
A Selection of Poems
Copyright 2017 Sarah Ruden
Sarah Ruden
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sarah Ruden
Nationality United States
Alma mater University of Michigan B.A.
Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, M.A.
Harvard University, Ph.D. (Classical Philology)
Awards 1996 Central News Agency Literary Award for book of poems, Other Places
Website SarahRuden.com
Sarah Elizabeth Ruden is an American writer[1] of poetry, essays,[2] translations of Classic literature, and popularizations of Biblical philology, religious criticism and interpretation.[3][4][5][6]
Books[edit]
Poetry
Other Places. William Waterman Publications. 1995. (Awarded the 1996 Central News Agency Literary Award)[7]
Translations
Apuleius (2012). The Golden Ass (trans.). Yale Univ. Press.[8]
Virgil (2008). The Aeneid: Vergil (trans.). Yale Univ. Press.[9][10]
Homer (2005). The Homeric Hymns. (Homeric poems) (trans.). Hackett.[11]
Aristophanes (2003). Aristophanes: Lysistrata, Translated, with Notes and Topical Commentaries (trans.). Hackett.[12]
Petronius (2000). The Satyricon of Petronius: A New Translation with Topical Commentaries (trans.). Hackett.[13]
Biblical interpretation
Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time. Image. 2011.[14]
The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible. Pantheon. 2017.[15]
References[edit]
Biography portal
icon Classics portal
Theology portal
Jump up ^ http://www.respectfulconversation.net/sarah-ruden/
Jump up ^ "The Mandela Myth". The American Conservative. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ College, Stonehill. "Sarah Ruden · Stonehill College". www.stonehill.edu. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ "Sarah Ruden’s Rebellion Against Our ‘Just the Facts’ Bibles". ChristianityToday.com. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ Swaim, Barton (2017-05-26). "The Babel of Biblical Translation". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ College, Stonehill. "Sarah Ruden · Stonehill College". www.stonehill.edu. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ "African Book Award Database Search Results". www.indiana.edu. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ "Putting Paul in his place: Examining the apostle through the eyes of a classicist". USCatholic.org. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ Learning, Gale, Cengage (2015-09-24). A Study Guide for Virgil's Aeneid. Gale, Cengage Learning. ISBN 9781410335036.
Jump up ^ "With Seamus Heaney in Elysium". Harvard Magazine. 2016-06-06. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ "How to Read the Bible: Slowly, and Sport with the Words". National Review. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ "Spike Lee Is Back in His Element With Chi-Raq, Perhaps the Greatest Antigun Movie Ever". Vulture. 2015-12-04. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ "Satyricon". www.hackettpublishing.com. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ Lampman, Jane (2010-04-04). "Book reviews: 'Paul Among the People' by Sarah Ruden, 'The Hidden Power of the Gospels' by Alexander J. Shaia". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2017-05-31.
Jump up ^ http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447833/bible-hebrew-greek-literature-ancient-languages-sarah-ruden-face-water-translator-beauty-meaning
Authority control
WorldCat Identities VIAF: 69176583 LCCN: n96056854 ISNI: 0000 0000 3673 2466 SUDOC: 131231960 BNF: cb14583858g (data) BIBSYS: 10103292
Categories: American women poetsAmerican classical scholars21st-century American poetsHarvard University alumniJohns Hopkins University alumniLiving peopleAmerican Christian writersTranslators of the Bible into EnglishUniversity of Michigan alumni
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Rod Dreher
Sarah Ruden, a joyful iconoclast
Posted by Rod Dreher
image: http://blog.beliefnet.com/roddreher/files/import/sarahruden.jpg
sarahruden.jpgThe most exciting book of historical analysis I’ve read in ages — indeed the most exciting book period — is the Classical scholar and translator Sarah Ruden’s “Paul Among the People” (Pantheon) which attempts to defend St. Paul against his modernist critics (e.g. those who consider him an impossible troglodyte for his views on women and homosexuals) by explaining the Greco-Roman social and cultural context in which he composed his letters. It’s quite eye-opening, and remarkable in part because Ruden is a research fellow at Yale Divinity School (no bastion of Christian conservatism), as well as a Quaker pacifist. <
Clearly a pacifist who would take on translating “The Aeneid” is someone with an intrepid character and an iconoclastic way of seeing the world. Did you know Ruden is the first woman to have translated the entire epic poem?
I recently had an e-mail exchange with her, and publish it here, with her permission. It’s a little long; part one is here, and part two is below the jump. What she has to say I find remarkable — especially the respect she learned for the power of faith on the ground in South Africa (that part is after the jump, which is to say, in the extended entry):
I told an academic friend about your St. Paul book, and he said, “Wow, I guess she doesn’t much care about her future in academia.” The idea is that by writing a book defending the apostle’s most controversial positions, especially on women and homosexuality, you are sabotaging your career prospects. What do you say to that?
Well, luckily I don’t have to worry about my future in academia, because I’m only a virtual academic now. I can only credit God for bringing me out of what was and might have stayed a catastrophe.
My father was an environmental biology professor, and my mother taught high school biology. My brother is a biological anthropology professor. My sister is an entomologist (bugs) and married a biology professor. But as a teenager I couldn’t get started on the science career expected of me: I still can’t add up a column of figures or read a diagram, though I’m good at languages.
I couldn’t imagine life outside the academy, but my family wasn’t able to advise or help me in the humanities. At twenty-one I took a dumb flying leap into a Harvard Ph.D. program in Latin and Greek. I’d rather not go into the practical results, except to note that any serious effort on my part toward an academic career ended when I dropped off the tenure track at the University of Cape Town fifteen years ago. I’ve now had a series of non-funded visiting scholar appointments (with occasional teaching), which I enjoy and am grateful for, and<>
One good thing, I think, coming from a lot of hard experience is that, though I’ve seen a lot of the academy, I still see it the way a child would. It was never made comfortable for me, and I never developed any insider rationalizations. I’m sure I have the sourest of grapes, but I do encounter people who ask the same childish questions–more such people now that so much of the money is gone, and now that Western culture is in such distress and doubt.
Here’s some of what I want to know. Why should we hugely compress the range of historical time from which we cause students to read, and also the array of permitted thematic questions? (In many schools, you’re now not only kept to race, gender, and class, but you’re punished if you say anything ABOUT race, gender, or class that quite a tiny elite wouldn’t also say.) And why at the same time do we tell students that, anyway, it’s all about their expressing their own concerns, when they don’t yet know what an intellectual concern is? Isn’t that going to produce little more than a confused boredom and a little skill at parroting?
I’d like to see some of the seriousness of science brought back to the humanities. My father treated both his curriculum and his research as life-and-death matters. He looked at a biology class and believed it was up to him to dissuade them, for example, from smoking, or from allowing toxic waste dumps without proper liners in their future communities. He looked at an epidemiological study and pictured a childhood leukemia victim shrieking as her IV shunt is put in, and his mind raced over the knowledge and technology and laws that could prevent such suffering. My sister and brother-in-law don’t see any important difference between their work in a college and their environmental activism–in short, people need them. What’s the big difference between those attitudes and the attitude that should prevail in the humanities?
That’s especially true right now. Through literature, and especially religious literature, we can ask questions related to our survival. “Now that we have such hard choices, what’s actually useful to us? Who and what are we, anyway?”
If I could give one suggestion for revitalizing higher education, it would be to re-emphasize and reward general knowledge and good teaching, and slacken publication requirements. These compel scholars to produce rickety treehouses of specialization. If you can get papers and books out on topics nobody on the outside cares about, you can fill your quota in safety from competition and criticism–with the cooperation of colleagues who are doing the same in their own research. I don’t blame any of them–they have families to support and few professional alternatives, and they can’t change the system from inside. But I do fervently wish it would change.
What do you say to those who would argue that you, a Quaker pacifist, are giving aid and comfort to their enemies the religious conservatives with this book?
Well, I wouldn’t agree that anyone accusing me of giving aid and comfort to enemies is a fellow pacifist in the first place. Among pacifists, that ought to be a compliment, not an accusation.
<
Christ–and Paul–called us first of all to love one another. That’s why the liberal Quaker Meetings, no matter how right they thought they were, and no matter how frustrated they became, didn’t say to their dissenters: “Hey, obviously we must allow gay marriage, and if you don’t like it, you’re reactionary and don’t belong here.” That’s also why, in the book, I worked hard not to denigrate the liberty of conservative Christians–including Paul! The modern conservatives have had different experiences than I have, as Paul did. That doesn’t say anything against their goodwill, or against their membership with me in the family of Christ.
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[Read more of my exchange with Sarah Ruden by clicking forward…]
I am an Orthodox Christian, and what most people would call a religious conservative, though “traditionalist” would be more accurate. I find myself ever more frustrated with an alienated from the cultural politics of American religion, because they impoverish our understanding of what Scripture and Tradition has to tell us, and condition our minds to regard faith instrumentally. I don’t want a church or synagogue to be The Republican Party at Prayer, or The Democratic Party at Prayer. In my daily prayers and thoughts about how to live out my faith more perfectly in this world, I am growing more aware by how radical the Christian call is to stand in opposition to some of the most cherished dogmas of both the liberal and conservative political movements. (Robert Inchausti’s great book “Subversive Orthodoxy: Outlaws, Revolutionaries and Other Christians in Disguise” is the book to read on this). I suppose what excited me so much about your book on St. Paul is how even though you come out of what is generally thought to be a liberal religious tradition (insofar as that label means anything today), you fiercely reject our culturally conditioned reading of Scripture, and the Pauline letters, in an attempt to figure out what the Apostle was actually trying to say to his readers. It seems to me to require an almost heroic effort to clear away all the ideological Kultursmog that the culture warriors of left and right put out, and to try to see a thing for what it is — and to wrestle with it openly and cleanly. Put another way, I’m eager to let the ignorant armies of left and right carry on their trench warfare, while we who may generally identify broadly with either the conservative or progressive religious and intellectual traditions run off together to recover the ability to see things with fresh eyes, and to talk about them honestly and rigorously, but without rancor. I mean, what else is there? What could possibly be more dull than the same old polemical pissing matches between left and right, and the self-satisfied congeries of the righteous on both sides, standing together to affirm their mutual goodness against the evil Other, from whom they arrogantly believe there is nothing to learn?
Is this impossibly Utopian, in your view?
It IS impossibly Utopian, in the best way: it’s religious! As long as we acknowledge that Utopia belongs to God, then our work will be humble enough to strive toward God’s Kingdom, not our own rigid and very limited notions of what’s right and good.
In my circles, we’re supposed to deride the flag-waver who asserts that God loves our nation more than others, but I’m bored with that, and more inclined to get annoyed with the typical clerical politician of the left–just because no one around me challenges him, however strange his statements: for example, that “poverty elimination” and Christianity are functionally the same thing.
Aside from the obvious Scriptural and theological objections you could make to that, there are horrors of the twentieth century to look back on: the massive poverty elimination projects in the Soviet Union, North Korea, Cambodia, China, and Tanzania. The result was always elimination of the poor, those irritating barriers between human ideology and agency, and the paradise leaders insisted that these can create on their own.
In many South African NGOs, I saw played out the paradox that faith is the basic thing that brings social justice. Activists who relied on their human capacities were ground into the dust. Activists who believed that God was in charge were unstoppable. If they got things wrong, they just tried another way, because they saw themselves as weak sinners with a very partial vision; it was okay, and in fact comforting, to admit they were wrong. If their practical goals turned out to be destructive or impossible, they could cheerfully let them go–to love God was their mission, which no one could take away from them. And like Paul, they have done far more for human justice than they ever consciously intended, merely by impressing on people–who had never heard such a thing–that God cared about them and had suffered for them. The passion for justice in southern Africa is, I believe, mainly a legacy of the Scottish missionaries. So dig it–I’m a Quaker in awe of Calvinists.
Love that Sarah Ruden. Buy her books, willya? She needs to be encouraged to write more of them.
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About Rod Dreher
Rod Dreher is director of publications at the John Templeton Foundation, a philanthropy that focuses on science, religion, economics and morality. A journalist with over 20 years of experience, Dreher has written for The Dallas Morning News, the New York Post, and other newspapers and journals. He is author of the book "Crunchy Cons." Archives of his previous Beliefnet blog, "Crunchy Con," can be found here. He and his family live in Philadelphia.
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ARTS & CULTUREBOOKS
AUGUST 21, 2017 ISSUE
Augustine gets a makeover in new translation. He hardly needed it.
Elizabeth Bruenig
July 05, 2017
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Augustine’s Confessions is not an under-translated book. A reader limiting herself to modern translations could avail herself of the English vicar J. G. Pilkington’s late 19th-century effort; the Methodist theologian Albert Outler’s; the Anglican priest and Cambridge theologian Henry Chadwick’s; the Oxford professor E. B. Pusey’s; the poet, author and lawyer Frank Sheed’s (my personal favorite); or any number of others. Translating the Confessions at this point is not a matter of lending a hand to stranded students with poor Latin but rather a critical intervention. In the case of the classicist Sarah Ruden, it is a rescue mission.
“I would rather fail openly, fall while going out on a limb for [Augustine], than leave him up there with no chance,” Ruden writes in the introduction to her new translation of the gracious doctor’s Confessions.
Confessions
by Augustine; translation by Sarah Ruden
Modern Library. 528p $19.75
It might come as a surprise to inheritors of the Western tradition that Augustine is in trouble. A perennial favorite on college reading lists, Augustine is credited by thinkers like Charles Taylor and Larry Siedentop with having laid the intellectual foundations for our modern age. Meanwhile, religious readers know him as a revered saint in the Catholic Church and a beloved theologian among many Protestants, with the rare honor of being a favorite of both pious followers of the Vatican and diehard reformists. If one progenitor of both theological masterworks and workaday spiritual autobiographies—of both high and low Christian literature—must be chosen, it is easily the renowned bishop of Hippo.
But Ruden is having none of that. To start with, she does not like the title Confessions; she would prefer, she writes, to call Augustine’s classic something like The Testimonies. After all: “the Early Christians had procedures for penitence (though nothing like the Catholic rite in its later form), but that is not what Augustine is doing in his book.” Heaven forbid that someone miss the distinction.
By Ruden’s lights, <
Instead of the fusty old churchman we all know, Sarah <
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Instead of the fusty old churchman we all know or, perhaps even worse, a contemporary Christian (Ruden states that she rejects the word abstinence in her translation due to its “distracting reminder of a long-running American public education controversy”), Ruden’s Augustine is a dreamer, an artist, a poet. “I maintain that the Augustine of the Confessions was a feeling man more than a thinking one,” she writes; the weight of so many centuries of Christian admirers, scholars and clerics has obscured his beautiful spirit, and with her volume she seeks to restore it.
Ruden’s translation is at times just as jarring as her mission statement. Prior readers of Augustine will immediately notice that she renders dominus as “Master” instead of “Lord.” Early Christians certainly imagined themselves as slaves of Christ, and there is perhaps a useful spiritual lesson in that tradition, though Ruden admits her own personal “distaste” for it. Her reasoning is that in praying to God, Augustine could not have been imagining a “political ruler,” which is implied by “Lord,” but rather must have imagined the master of a household. For Ruden, “Master” is meant to convey this apolitical sense of ownership.
Is it really the case that Augustine could not have been imagining both a lord and a master? In Book 19 of City of God, Augustine provides the equitable rule of the paterfamilias over his household as an element of a properly functioning city. Well-ordered and peaceful homes, he argues, have a relation to well-ordered and peaceful polities. The line between the political and the domestic blurs. Must Augustine really have preferred one to the exclusion of the other?
One can ask the same of Ruden’s insistence that, in the Confessions at least, Augustine was “feeling” rather than “thinking.”
Even in Ruden’s quest to recover the bishop’s emotional prose from his allegedly boring traditional translators, some of his more famously poetic passages receive a rather infelicitous treatment. In R. G. Pine-Coffin’s translation, Augustine asks God: “Why do you mean so much to me? Help me find words to explain…. Tell me why you mean so much to me. Whisper into my heart, I am here to save you.” Anyone who has ever pined for a lover can feel the echo of his longing and its aching immediacy. In Ruden’s rendering, on the other hand, the first clause is dropped altogether, and the next reads: “Have pity on me and let me speak…. Tell me, in the name of your mercies, you, Master, who are my God, what you are to me. Say to my soul, ‘I myself am your rescue.’”
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There are aesthetic costs, too, to eschewing tradition in favor of strict originalism. In the famous opening of Book 3, wherein Augustine arrives in the licentious city of Carthage, the infamous polis is usually described as a cauldron, from the Latin sartago. It is no accident that sartago, a kind of shallow stew pan often used for dishes composed of unlike ingredients, bears a sonic resemblance to Carthage (in Latin, Carthago). There is no way to retain the rhyme in English, unfortunately, so most translators have gone for capturing the sense of roiling, bubbling and jostling that one takes away from Augustine’s culinary metaphor; a cauldron must suffice where no better pot is available. Ruden, on the other hand, opts for “skillet,” which captures the flatness of the pan better than the chaotic, vaguely witchy character of a cauldron’s contents—but it is the latter Augustine appears to have been aiming at. Ruden’s translation may tell us more about Roman cookery than we would have known otherwise, but in famous and formative passages like these, one is often left wishing for more care for Augustine’s intentions.
Augustine was a poet, yes, but also an intellectual; he was an imaginative dreamer, but also a Christian. All of those facets were united in one man, and it is difficult to see what, if anything, might be gained by trying to split them up.
This article also appeared in print, under the headline "Augustine gets a makeover," in the August 21, 2017 issue.
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Elizabeth Bruenig
Elizabeth Bruenig, a contributing writer for America, writes about Christianity and politics.
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Sarah Ruden
Sarah Ruden
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Sarah Ruden is a journalist, poet, translator, and writer on religion and culture. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010 to translate Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and she has also published translations of Homeric Hymns, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. In addition to translation, Ruden writes about religion, including her Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Re-imagined in His Own Time, which contrasts Paul’s comparatively egalitarian vision against contemporaneous Greek and Roman literature. She received South Africa’s then-leading book prize, The Central News Agency Literary Award, for her collection of poems titled Other Places in 1996.
Ruden earned a Ph.D. in classical philology from Harvard University, after which she spent ten years working as a writer in South Africa. Her work there shed light on the role the church had played and could play in alleviating the post-apartheid problems. Ruden’s ninth book, The Music Inside the Whale, and Other Marvels: A Translator on the Beauty of the Bible, will be published shortly.
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Note & Query
Seeking Truth and Beauty in Service of the King
Interview with Sarah Ruden
Posted on JUNE 5, 2017Categories Bible, book review, publishing
In the past month, I interviewed Sarah Ruden about her new book, The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible (published by Pantheon Books), and her new translation of St. Augustine’s Confessions (published by The Modern Library). The two interviews can be found here and here, respectively.
In the run up to the interviews and in their wake, Sarah and I traded messages about Augustine, the Bible, and other topics. Sarah kindly granted me permission to reproduce parts of our exchange here in an edited format.
Garrett: I can’t help but begin by asking: Is there a work of Greek or Latin literature that is unduly overlooked? Or, to put a different spin on the question, is there a work of Greek or Latin literature that should be better known or more widely read by Christians?
Sarah: I’m an interested party, because I’ve translated this work myself, but still I can’t resist recommending Apuleius’s Golden Ass, a comic novel of the mid-second century A.D. The book gives vivid pictures of ordinary people’s lives at a time of great growth in Christianity. Also, the story is full of moral and religious themes and offers the most detailed account to date of a religious conversion; the conversion is to the worship of the goddess Isis, but the differences from and similarities to Christian conversions are fascinating in themselves.
Garrett: Is it hard for us moderns to understand the religious world of first-century Jews and Christians? How do we get inside it? I recently read Mary Beard’s SPQR, and I was reminded of the brutality of the period but also of its vitality and richness. By contrast, religion in American seems more uniform and perhaps less risky.
Sarah: Just yesterday, I had a discussion with a young relative who was visiting my husband and me, and I think that what I told him helps me answer you, though in very broad terms. Traditional pagan religion gave almost no value to personal and individual belief. Very often in modern America, you hear, “I believe in God, but what goes on in church does nothing for me.” That would have horrified any respectable pagan; nobody cared whether he believed in the stories about the divine, or in the supernatural at all, but sacrifices and other rituals were NOT optional: they stood for his membership in his society.
The Hebrew Bible, quite early, had started to challenge such an attitude, and the early followers of Christ rolled the essential rituals back to one, baptism, and greatly stressed “faith/belief/trust”—pistis in Greek. That was the start of a long process of internalization and individualization. But both Judaism and Christianity were still intensely social. Paul’s letters carry over the Jewish emphasis on the sinfulness and righteousness of whole communities; groups were considered to have dynamic, dramatic relationships to the divine, compared to which individual relationships were not such a big deal.
Maybe the impression (which I share) that our religion is more uniform and less risky comes partly from so much of that religion’s taking place in our separate minds and hearts. There are social circles in the United States—which is supposed to be such a religious place!—in which talking about religion, or manifesting it in any way, is held to be in terrible taste, like treating associates to an account of bathroom routines. There’s an understandable desire to avoid conflict, true, but also a widespread and maybe growing feeling that religion should simply be private.
Garrett: Speaking of Mary Beard, I recently listened to a spirited debate from 2015 between her and Boris Johnson, former mayor of London, on ancient Greece v. ancient Rome. So I put the question to you: Greece or Rome?
Sarah: I’m not one of those people who consider Greek culture more brilliant. There isn’t a poet more satisfying than Horace or more fun than Juvenal, both of them Romans dealing with the practical and the ordinary in virtuoso language and with compelling insight. To prefer Plato just because he’s so concerned with the abstract and the speculative is like preferring Thomas Aquinas to Jane Austen—it’s inconceivable to me. And those traditional characterizations of the Romans as cold-hearted bureaucrats and imperialist brutes—well, the actual historical record doesn’t show the Greeks as more virtuously inclined; they just weren’t as stable or organized. The Athenians, for example, were perfectly happy to work thousands of slaves to death in silver mines and build their great monuments with other nations’ tribute; but their material ascendancy—because of their own folly—was so brief that they didn’t wear, so to speak, what they did. It just breezes by in the background to their art and literature, which did last.
Garrett: Since you wrote Paul Among the People, and perhaps even as you worked on The Face of Water, did Paul continue to surprise you in the way he uses language to articulate the gospel or his guidance to the early church?
Sarah: Paul is endlessly surprising and fascinating. For the volume Abraham’s Dice, which is about ideas of chance and providence, I had to come up with a whole new schema to try to summarize what he felt about fate, randomness, and the purpose of life. What he thought and taught just didn’t seem to me to fit in well with anything else, either on the Jewish religious or the Greek philosophical side.
In The Face of Water, I confronted the possibility that the momentous notion of “election”—which culminates in the Calvinist assertion that saved individuals are chosen unchangeably from the beginning of time—owes something to some joyous and lighthearted wordplay of Paul in Romans 8:33 (KJV: “Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth”). It looks to me, in this verse at least, not as if he’s naming a special category of people who are inherently “elect” or “chosen” but rather that he’s just pointing out the absurdity of the notion that any force in the universe could haul INTO court for a verdict of damnation those (that is, all of Jesus’ sincere followers) who are singled OUT for a friendly verdict by the ultimate judge, God, through his love. In other words, the divine fix is in. This is part of the courtroom conceit that dominates the passage. The critical words are the jingly enkahlesei (“INdict”) and eklektōn (“EXempted”).<< Paul’s language wasn’t just Greek; it was also rhetoric, the play of sounds and ideas.>> That’s how he made his points in detail, and with emotion, and with precision. <
Garrett: One of your stated intentions in the new book is to make the Bible “more of a living thing.” Why do people regard it as dead or distant? Can you explain more what you mean by that?
Sarah: I’m not sure “dead or distant” wouldn’t be overstating it. But, to some extent, the Bible seems a victim of its own success. For a large group of people, the book stands for a tradition they honor or a personal commitment, but usually both; for others, the book stands for everything they resist in thought and culture. I don’t consider it an impingement in any direction to<< propose considering the book in itself, as an amazing book>>. In fact, this seems to be a very good time to celebrate together<> that we possess in common.
In The Face of Water, I’m particularly enthusiastic about pointing out some literal translations and sound effects from, say, Psalm 23; the KJV of it is familiar and widely beloved, yet knowing more about the images and the musicality might deepen listeners’ appreciation; that’s what happened to me, anyway, when I was researching for the book.
Garrett: In the interview, you recommend learning Greek or Hebrew. Do you have a particular textbook or course that you recommend for beginners? And where does one start in Greek, Koine or Attic?
Sarah: I don’t think you can go badly wrong in using any widely accepted, standard textbook. I wouldn’t dare opine whether Koine or Attic should come first, as I never taught Koine, and never taught beginning Greek at all. But I can’t resist saying that I adore the elementary Hebrew textbook my teacher, Victoria Hoffer, co-authored. It incorporates the tough grammar into folk songs and pop songs to make it easier!
Garrett: Your translation of Augustine’s Confessions is out this month. Does the 500th anniversary of the Reformation cast new refracted light on the influence of Augustine’s work? Many of the reformers were inspired by his work.
Sarah: I don’t know about any renewed interest in Augustine regarding the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, but clearly the contrast is important. Augustine wanted to study and pray along with a small group of like-minded people, and was yanked and then finessed into religious leadership; he would have been overjoyed had the institutional church been the authority in all things, had it not needed him to assume any authority as a spokesman. Luther had little resistance to leadership once he sensed a crisis. In fact, he had a great zest for leadership, and eventually a real mission against authority.
I don’t know whether you’ve followed the controversy over Rod Dreher’s book The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, but this to me is an intriguing counterpoint: clearly in the case of Augustine, who wrote the first monastic rule, the reasons for withdrawing from the world were not broadly political or cultural, but deeply personal as well as religious: Augustine was stressed to the point of a breakdown.
Garrett: What are the most famous passages of The Confessions? Do you have a favorite?
Sarah: Some famous passages in The Confessions are the “theft” from the pear tree (2.9), Monica abandoned (5.15; there’s a famous parallel passage in Catullus), the encounter with the drunken beggar (6.9), the gladiator contest (6.13), and the whole episode of Monica’s death (9.17–37). The last one is a fascinating look into an ordinary yet extraordinary woman’s life and mind.
Garrett: In the interview, you talk about the drunken beggar passage in The Confessions.
Sarah: Yes. It’s an important, vivid passage concerning Augustine’s vocation, but it doesn’t get enough attention. It shows how even a momentary, even a sordid sight was packed with meaning of this author. Meaning was his drug of choice!
Garrett: In undergrad, I was required to take a five-sequence Western Civ. course, which formed the core of my liberal education in many ways. It’s etched in my memory that one of my professors, the one who had the most influence on my thinking at the time, referred to Augustine as “that little shit.” I now regret not pressing into what he meant by that. I suspect it has something to do with a feeling that Augustine can be sanctimonious or arrogant. I’ve never quite heard Augustine’s voice in that way. Have you encountered that persona, or at least this attitude toward him, in his writings?
Sarah: In my view,<< there’s a great deal to admire in Augustine but little to like>>. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot against his <
But the Augustine life story and the Confessions narrative themselves are fairly insulting to a modern women: attachment to female (except Mom) = deadly worldliness and distraction, ergo subtract female (dispatching her to celibate community herself), while retaining precious progeny. Yes, I know to read all this within the culture (in general a lot rougher on women than Augustine was) and intellectual tradition (reaching back to Plato). Still, it stings.
Speaking of the intellectual tradition, I believe Augustine suffers in his reputation simply from being a great intellectual. Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals makes the case against such people in the modern world, and as a conservative writer, he concentrates on people like Shelley and Tolstoy and Marx. (BTW, have you read Orwell on Tolstoy and Gandhi? Whew!) But these high-handed thinkers do go back at least to Plato. They’re writers who have not only the power of imagination, as all artists do, but the imagination of power. They say, convincingly, “The world will be as I envision, or will end badly.” The eventual popular backlash is as powerful as the original popular persuasion. I speculate that this has a lot to do with language, with the intellectual’s deep understanding of inherited and shared experiences and patterns of thought, as these can best be expressed right now, during his lifetime; but of course that influence weakens over time; distant generations struggle even to understand it.
It’s becoming sort of a mission of mine to persuade people at least to be aware of what has happened. This helps in appreciating big ideas and continuities and indebtedness and in feeling connection to benign universal purpose—for me as a Quaker, that’s God. I’ve worked on Plato recently (a translation of Hippias Minor, an early dialogue) and on Paul some time ago (Paul Among the People), and now also on the anonymous Old and New Testament writers (The Face of Water), and it’s like working with Augustine: when I see how skillful an author was with language, how he must have sweated it as a vehicle for his ideas, then the ideas (however they’re shaped on their own) are—friendlier; and they’re friendly in the first place in the Jewish and Christian traditions, which concentrate on the community’s and the individual’s relationship with a loving God.
Garrett: Your work is a potent reminder of how much we miss in translation. This is one reason why I eagerly await your translation of the gospels. Fortunately, readers can find your some of your translations to date in The Face of Water and on your website.
Sarah: The “little doggies” from Mark 7:24–29 of the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman is my favorite one.
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Print Marked Items
Confessions
Publishers Weekly.
264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p68.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Confessions
Augustine, trans. from the Latin by Sarah
Ruden. Modern Library, $28 (528p) ISBN 9780-8129-9656-2
Written in Latin during the late fourth century C.E., this memoir from the North African saint--one of the earliest
examples of autobiographical narrative--receives a wholly new translation by poet, essayist, and translator Ruden
(Other Places). Approaching her subject with deep religious and historical knowledge, she chooses to translate
Augustine as a performative, engaging storyteller rather than a systematic theologian. Beginning with his babyhood and
struggles with early schooling, Augustine traces his own intellectual and religious development through adolescence
into middle adulthood. Born to a family of both Christian and pagan faith, Augustine migrated to Italy as a young adult
to pursue a career in rhetoric. Before committing himself to a life of celibate religiosity, Augustine spent roughly a
decade in a long-term relationship with a woman, and the two had a son. Augustine also explored and ultimately
rejected Manichaeism. He would become, during and after his life, a pivotal figure in the history of Christianity. While
acknowledging that earlier translations may have been "learned and serviceable," Ruden argues that much is lost when
Augustine's linguistic playfulness is downplayed. An extensive introduction delves into the translator's decisions,
particularly those that depart most sharply from those of her predecessors. The resulting work is delightfully readable
while still densely theological. <
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Confessions." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA490319317&it=r&asid=e44abb3c67235003a8a82a87a044b9a7.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490319317
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Ruden, Sarah: THE FACE OF WATER
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ruden, Sarah THE FACE OF WATER Pantheon (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 3, 28 ISBN: 978-0-307-90856-8
A poet and translator of classical literature tackles the Good Book to find concealed biblical meaning and nuance.There
are peculiarities, Ruden (Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, 2010,
etc.) discovered, with the King's English versions of the Old and New Testaments, even if that King is James. Of
course, other translations of Scripture have faults, too, but when one seeks to understand what they meant when they
first entered the canon, King James is the standard for comparison. The author digs into the original classic Hebrew for
the Old Testament and "common dialect" Koine Greek for the New. She compares the rhetorical conventions, grammar,
style, and poetics of the Hebrew and Greek to the King James. As paired case studies in translation, she presents,
among other passages, the story of David and Bathsheba and the Lord's Prayer, the accounts of Genesis and the Virgin
Birth, the Ten Commandments and the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the book of Jonah and Paul's comments on
circumcision. Ruden retranslates these passages primarily for accuracy. "Don't close this book," she writes, "and turn on
a PBS documentary about ferrets: what I'm about to tell you is way more interesting." She follows that with a grammar
lesson on indicative and subjunctive moods in Hebrew verb forms. Terms for figures of speech abound, and appended
at length are translations with transliterations of Hebrew and Greek with their linguistic peculiarities intact; it will
surely be unhelpful to acolytes, while experts will ignore the linguistic detours. Ruden finds hidden meaning in the
intricate arrangement of the ancient vocabularies, poetics, and lifestyles, and therein lies the fun. The book is often a
master class in translation and Bible studies, though casual readers will decide if her "giant crowd" is more felicitous
than "great multitude." No version of the Bible is the last word, as this text for grammarians, seminarians, and savants
demonstrates--simultaneously didactic and entertaining, academic and easygoing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Ruden, Sarah: THE FACE OF WATER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234436&it=r&asid=bd4db194317bdefdfc104a35b02b9e59.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234436
---
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Ruden, Sarah. The Face of Water: A Translator
on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible
Brian Sullivan
Library Journal.
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p105.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Ruden, Sarah. The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible. Pantheon. Mar. 2017.288p.
bibliog. index. ISBN 9780307908568. $26.95; ebk. ISBN 9780307908575. REL
Translator, scholar, and poet Ruden (Paul Among the People) here takes readers on a thoughtful journey into the depths
of the Bible in its original Hebrew and Greek. Her purpose was to "read in the original languages some of the bestknown
passages of the Bible and describe what I saw and heard there." The need for this work grew out of the author's
sense of how much is lost in most English translations, not only aesthetically but also in meaning. This book is her
attempt to convey some of what is, quite literally, lost in translation. Ruden explores topics such as grammar,
vocabulary, style, and comedy in more than a dozen passages, including Psalm 23, the Lord's Prayer, and Ezekiel's
Vision of Dry Bones. After examining the various aspects of language, <
author,<
general readers and not quite scholarly enough for most academics, this delightful book will be a beloved treasure for
select readers with an interest in deepening their appreciation of the Bible and the challenges that come with translating
it faithfully and authentically.--Brian Sullivan, Alfred Univ. Lib., NY
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sullivan, Brian. "Ruden, Sarah. The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible." Library
Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 105. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562385&it=r&asid=34316f190de9b67a252225cc40b81950.
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The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and
Meaning in the Bible
Publishers Weekly.
264.2 (Jan. 9, 2017): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible
Sarah Ruden. Pantheon, $26.95 (288p)
ISBN 978-0-307-90856-8
Ruden, visiting scholar at Brown University and translator of classical literature, shifts from secular works to the
Hebrew and Greek language of the Bible for a close analysis and retranslation of a few key passages, such as the story
of David and Bathsheba, the Beatitudes, and the Lord's Prayer.<
her work, debunking both myths and poor prior interpretations. The book is not only a scholarly analysis, though, but a
paean to the rhythm and poetry of the text. Rudin also diverges from standard academic tone, weaving her own
personal stories together with her intellectual task; all this makes the reader feel as if they are spending time with a fun-
-and very smart--friend. This combination of casual ease and serious scholarship allows Ruden to bring <
the Bible. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible." Publishers Weekly, 9 Jan. 2017, p. 61. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477339355&it=r&asid=6a06dc402546a2f968fe22327444be9b.
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A classic renewed
Tracy Lee Simmons
National Review.
64.5 (Mar. 19, 2012): p45.
COPYRIGHT 2012 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Full Text:
The Golden Ass, by Apuleius, translated by Sarah Ruden (Yale, 288 pp., $30)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Translating makes a dirty, thankless business--except, of course, to those for whom the work is its own reward. The
translator stands to readers rather as the piano player does to patrons in a frontier saloon, ignored if folks are having a
ripping good time and shot if they're not. It's the realm not only of educated guesses, but of halting hunches as well,
even when the translator is a scholar. Few arts are more inexact. This sticky predicament gets compounded when the
work rendered into modern idiom hails from one of the ancient languages; critics may assail a translation on
philological or historical grounds, but proving that it's utterly wrong becomes more tricky with every century separating
us from the date of composition. A better informed, more nuanced guess is still a guess. Yet somebody has to do it.
Without able, ingenious translators our cultural life would be hugely impoverished, our view into the past extended no
farther than the horizon we can see behind us. We would all be provincials.
Sarah Ruden, a younger scholar and poet who has already taken an estimable swing in the big leagues with, among
other works, that monolith of Latin literature, Virgil's Aeneid, now takes on The Golden Ass by Apuleius, a quirky
Roman author of the second century A.D., and though her call to wade into the baroque prose of an early novelist may
not strike us as an obvious move to make after the heady heights of Virgilian verse, the result is a rollicking ride well
worth the fare. To know a bit about Apuleius and his time is to understand why.
Apuleius arose out of that period in classical times known as the Second Sophistic, an age when the cleverest
wordsmiths in Greek found the language of their time worn out and desiccated, and so they yearned to resurrect--
zealously if artificially--the eloquence of the Golden Age of fifth-century B.C. Athens by closely emulating in their
works some of the rhetorical forms of those bygone days. This movement amounted to a cultural fashion, and as such it
sent out ripples among Roman authors, who still took many stylistic cues from the Greeks, and Apuleius was one of the
flowers of the trend. And what an odd trend it was. In the shrewdest hands some fine objects got crafted, though the
workaday products coming from the witless could be less than stirring--literary jumbles of "verbal stunts" (as Ruden
says) about very little, virtuoso style matched with thin substance. It would be as though we found ourselves convinced
that the English we used every day had become too tired, frayed, and inexpressive to serve our literary purposes and so
resolved to write henceforth solely with the rhetorical flourishes of, say, Shakespeare, only to discover that we had little
to talk about but mouthwash, Facebook, and Cheetos.
To his and our good fortune, Apuleius was not among the uninspired. He possessed the talent to employ his verbal
exuberance to the utmost. Had he not opted to concoct tales of the fantastic and bizarre--however much he freely
borrowed some of the plots of those tales from other authors, a common practice of the time--he probably could have
written about his own life by itself and kept readers entertained for millennia. A man educated in the cosmopolitan
manner, he had come from an outpost of the empire (modern Algeria), traveled broadly, hovered about mystery cults,
and found himself in a few scrapes worthy of a novelist's invention, including a lawsuit brought against him after he
married the rich mother of one of his friends. Probably his was a life and character fit only for crime or authorship.
The Golden Ass (or, as it was titled earlier in its career, Metamorphoses) comes down to us as an early example of socalled
meta-fiction, a story in one sense about storytelling; stories are told within other stories. But there's no need to
get theoretical to enjoy this series of outlandish incidents and its bawdy, brazen dramatis personae. We might call it a
fairy tale for grown-ups. It's a story by turns hilarious, coarse, and tender, a bit of sophisticated playfulness at the center
of which a man named Lucius finds himself, by a magical trick gone wrong, transformed into a donkey and forced to
wander doggedly from place to place to find the magic that will restore him to human form. But that goal takes on
secondary rank as he's improbably presented with one crude or lewd or ribald or violent episode after another and
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listens to tale upon tale, some of which--like that of Cupid and Psyche--have gone on to live independently of their
setting here. His troubles are solved in the end, movingly, through divine direction and humble submission.
But <
herself thoroughly conversant with the Latin text and so she knows that a strict, lexicon-led rendition of this work
would issue in a translation all at once stiff, dull, and wrong; the words would be right, more or less, but the tone would
be woefully, comically off. For Apuleius had created a narrator, she says, who is "sometimes urbane, sometimes naive,
sometimes ironic, self-pitying, and sym pathetic all within a single sentence"; further, this is an author who "bridges
loony gaps between registers with rhyme or alliteration" and uses "smooth rhetorical periods and delicately woven
poetic imagery [containing] obscenity or violence, a dissonance as weird but as entertaining as a groundhog in a frilly
dress." In other words, a tall order for a translator.
So how does one go about refabricating the tang of the original? <
advice from a well-read husband, she took up and, in places, strategically mimicked authors in English now known by
many for their "slatternly ornamentation" and boisterousness--P. G. Wodehouse, Kipling, and George MacDonald
Fraser--a method as inspired as it is sound. (I would add Captain Marryat.) We read "Now, I was making my way home
from a dinner party somewhat late, and I was, well, more or less plastered--I won't try to disavow my guilt in this," and
we think we hear Jeeves shimmer into the room the next morning to prepare one of his potions for Bertie's hangover.
And yet it's right because it works. Oh, and Ruden also says she "had to blow off pretty comprehensively the creativewriting
professors who told me that semi-colons are pretentious; that adverbs are for trailer trash; that nobody who is
anybody ever italicized a word, wrote a long, complex sentence, or referred to an emotion otherwise than through a
sensory image," for which she ought to be awarded a Pulitzer and probably would be were it not for the fact that the
committee is enthralled to such splendidly, preternaturally stupid advice.
This book is not, to put it mildly, one to post on a marquee under "Wisdom Literature of the Western World." There's
wisdom here of a sort, but it's not, be warned, of the facile, didactic kind, and so this story would not be properly
featured on the reading lists of those wishing to encounter Greek and Roman minds in all their airy, placid aloofness in
order to pluck petals of moral or philosophical insight. <
say, one reads it for some of the same reasons one reads Don Quixote, another picaresque romp--<
aplomb.
Mr. Simmons is the author of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin. He is working on a book
about Thomas Jefferson.
Simmons, Tracy Lee
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Simmons, Tracy Lee. "A classic renewed." National Review, 19 Mar. 2012, p. 45. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA282583116&it=r&asid=287871778de1f4492c3affde1d4b721e.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
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Paul, to the life
John Wilson
National Review.
62.6 (Apr. 5, 2010): p50.
COPYRIGHT 2010 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
Full Text:
Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, by Sarah Ruden (Pantheon, 214
pp., $25)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
SARAH RUDEN is a poet and translator steeped in the literature of classical Greece and Rome. Her superb translation
of The Aeneid was published in 2008 by Yale University Press; she's also translated the Homeric Hymns, Aristophanes'
Lysistrata, and the Satyricon of Petronius. Her new book, Paul Among the People, is a sustained rebuke to lazy
projections of modern sensibilities onto the ancient world. And yet Ruden is an effective apologist for Paul precisely
because she well understands his cultured despisers, whose prejudices she shared not so long ago:
The last thing I expected my Greek and
Latin to be of any use for was a better
understanding of Paul. The very idea,
had anyone proposed it, would have
annoyed me. I am a Christian, but like
many, <> with
the louder and more sexist Old Testament
prophets. Jesus was my teacher;
Paul was an embarrassment.
Ruden acknowledges Paul's faults at the outset--"his bad temper, his self-righteousness, his anxiety"--but she goes on to
note that "we tend not to feel inspired that such a painfully human personality was able to achieve so much in the name
of God," a theme that Paul himself repeatedly underscores, emphasizing his own unworthiness. Point by point, Ruden
takes up the indictment against Paul: He was a killjoy, a misogynist, and virulently homophobic to boot; he counseled
deference to unjust authority, even urging slaves to obey their masters and make the best of their condition. Interpreting
Paul in the context of his time, Ruden shows how the charges against the apostle can't withstand scrutiny. She does so
by toggling between passages from Paul's New Testament letters and quotations from classical writers: This is the first
book about Paul I have ever read that treats him alongside Homer, Aristophanes, Plautus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid,
Petronius, Juvenal, and Apuleius, among others--not as their literary equal (Ruden speaks teasingly of Paul's "rough
art") but to convey a sense of attitudes and assumptions that were pervasive in the classical world, against which Paul's
message stands out in stark contrast.
So, for example, after noting the widespread prevalence of pedophilia in Paul's day--celebrated shamelessly in
stomach-turning texts--Ruden writes: "No wonder parents guarded their young sons doggedly. It was, for example,
normal for a family of any standing to dedicate one slave to a son's protection, especially on the otherwise unsupervised
walk to and from school: This was the pedagogue, or 'child leader.'" It was a culture in which virile manhood was the
measure of all things. Routine sex with slave boys, seduction of a free-born prepubescent youth, violent rape of an adult
male: All were manly acts with no opprobrium attached. Only the victims were mocked and scorned. Little wonder that
Paul's revolutionary denunciation of such behavior (Romans 1:24-27) struck a chord with many of his contemporaries.
Or consider the much-abused passage from I Corinthians 7, in which Paul talks about the marriage relationship. Is this
the testament of a killjoy, a hater of women? Hardly. This misreading makes sense only if we assume (falsely) that
"erotic, mutually fulfilling marriage was a ready option for Paul's followers, when actually he was calling them away
from either the tyranny of traditional arranged unions or the cruelty of sexual exploitation, or (in the case of married
men exploiting the double standard) both." Here and in many other passages, we find a forthright rejection of the
"unmitigated chauvinistic attitudes Paul would have found in Greco-Roman households, both in his boyhood Tarsus
and anywhere he would have traveled in the Roman Empire later."
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Paul created an honored place for celibacy as well as "putting brand-new limits on male desire" and "licensing female
desire, which had been under a regime of zero tolerance" (women, you see, "were supposed to stop at nothing once they
got started," but Paul regarded male and female desire as equal and reciprocal). And in so doing, Ruden observes,
Paul changed people's experience of
their emotions and their bodies in ways
that inevitably changed marriage,
though the new kind did not send down
deep roots until the modern age and the
end of the authoritarianism that began to
blight the church in the generations after
Paul. But real marriage is as secure a part
of the Christian charter, and as different
as from anything before or since, as the
command to turn the other cheek.
Notice what Ruden is doing here by mentioning one of the hard sayings of Jesus ("the command to turn the other
cheek") in conjunction with Paul's teaching on marriage. As a Quaker, Ruden has probably spent more time digesting
this injunction from Jesus than most of her fellow Christians have--but that doesn't mean she finds it easy to follow.
Indeed, in her concluding chapter, devoted to Paul's famous passage on love, Ruden asks, "How could anyone manage
to follow I Corinthians 13 and not go in sane?"
Fortunately she doesn't stop there. She goes on to answer her own question:
It might be possible if love is not an ethereal,
abstract standard, an impossible
assignment written in lightning on a
rock, but a living God. Suppose the love
people need to carry out loves them and
helps them, sometimes through the other
people it loves, and sometimes merely as
itself. Suppose it reaches out, calls, never
gives up on failure. Suppose that, though
human beings fail most of the time, love
never does.
It would be splendid to end on this note. Here, finally, is the conviction on which Ruden's argument rests, the source of
hope for all who share her faith. And yet for now, as Paul himself acknowledged, we see through a glass darkly. We
muddle along, bickering, divided, as fractious as the early church described in the Acts of the Apostles and in Paul's
own letters.
Still, in "reimagining" Paul with the aid of her intimate knowledge of classical literature, Ruden hasn't only helped us to
better understand him and his message in the context of his time (as indispensable as that service is). She has also
brought Paul to us, to our time. "The critic who forms his style on that of his author," Hugh Kenner once said, "not only
does mimetic homage, he avails himself intelligently of the author's principal research: how to write about the pertinent
world. For 18 months, wanting all the time to commence a book on Samuel Beckett ... I delayed until I could command
a style sufficiently like his for the purpose. Like, not identical; Beckett couldn't write a book on Beckett."
Nor could Paul write a book on Paul. But Sarah Ruden could and did.<< In an uncanny way, her book is animated by the
apostle's style: his urgency, his argumentative agility, his bluntness, his exasperation, his vision of great felicity>>
("though he almost needed to reinvent Greek to express it"). Turning the pages, I half expected the man from Tarsus to
come striding impatiently through the door. <
Mr. Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture, a bimonthly review.
Wilson, John
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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Wilson, John. "Paul, to the life." National Review, 5 Apr. 2010, p. 50. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA221596751&it=r&asid=36d7ec3072818f6c0970860c80d08393.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
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Paul among the People: The Apostle
Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time
Ray Olson
Booklist.
106.11 (Feb. 1, 2010): p10.
COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time.
By Sarah Ruden.
Feb. 2010. 240p. Pantheon, $25 (9780375425011). 225.9.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The astonishingly high quality of the new literature concerned with the greatest missionary apostle continues in poet
and classical translator Ruden's cross-referencing of Paul and his literary confreres who describe the world in which
Paul spread and strengthened the new faith in Christ. Her project enables her to call the standard repertoire of Pauline
characterizations seriously into question. Paul's cross-references show us a Greek and Roman world of great brutality,
given to pleasures carried to damaging and even fatal extremes. Nor was there any notion of inhumane punishment;
hence, crucifixion, to which only commoners and slaves were subjected. Homosexuality was basically anal rape of
adolescent boys, the more painful the better for the socially superior rapists. Women of high status were veiled, while
unveiled women were treated as prostitutes and criminals. Slaves were so unequal to masters that they might have been
a different, inferior species. The nonviolent love and community that Christianity preached radically differed from such
exploitative, status-based norms, and Paul's preaching, perceived as being against homosexuality and higher status for
non-ruling-class women and slaves, looks very different when contrasted with those Greco-Roman norms as reported
by writers from Aristophanes to Apuleius. Judiciously citing her own behavior to bring certain points home to
contemporary readers, Ruden is winningly intimate as well as impressively scholarly in this superb book.--Ray Olson
Olson, Ray
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Olson, Ray. "Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time." Booklist, 1 Feb.
2010, p. 10. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA219300198&it=r&asid=e2a5d8b020da14869f6be304e4e468ef.
Accessed 3 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A219300198
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The Golden Ass
Elizabeth Hand
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
124.5-6 (May-June 2013): p41.
COPYRIGHT 2013 Spilogale, Inc.
http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/
Full Text:
The Golden Ass , by Apuleius, translated by Sarah Ruden, Yale University Press, 2012, $30.
The Other Normals , by Ned Vizzini, Balzer & Bray, 2012, $17.99.
Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel , adapted and illustrated by Hope Larson, Farrar Straus
Giroux, 2012, $19.99.
"METHOUGHT I WAS ENAMORED OF AN ASS."
OH, PLEASE --get your mind out of the gutter. I'm talking about a book by a guy who's been dead for almost two
thousand years.
On second thought, the gutter may be the best place for contemplating Apuleius's masterpiece, also known as
Metamorphoses ; preferably with a wineskin in hand, though a suitcase of Budweiser wouldn't be bad, either. Written
sometime in the second century, The Golden Ass is <
Satryicon , composed less than a century earlier, is fragmentary; the two works were conflated in my mind since I first
read them back-to-back as research for a novel almost twenty years ago. Both <
these days--sudden shifts in point of view, inexplicable chronological leaps, characters' lack of believable motivation,
etc. Petronius could be forgiven some of this because his is not an extant manuscript; Apuleius didn't get off so easily. I
distinguished them as the one featuring Trimalchio's feast (Satyricon ) and the one where the narrator gets turned into a
donkey (guess).
The edition of The Golden Ass that I first read was Harry. C. Schnur's modern adaptation of William Aldington's 1566
translation. I didn't much care for it (sorry, Harry). I no longer have that book, but here's Aldington himself, from Book
1:
But he that laughed before
at his fellow, said againe,
Verily this tale is as true, as if
a man would say that by sorcery
and inchantment the
floods might be inforced to
run against their course....
Here's P. G. Walsh's 1994 translation of the same section:
But the man who had spoken
earlier said: "Surely this
lying tale of yours is only as
true as the claim that when
magic formulae are whispered,
running rivers go backward...."
And here's Sarah Ruden, in her recent demotic take on this dizzy tale of magic, sex, sex magic, gods, and goddesses:
But the speaker I just
quoted interposed: "I kid you
not," he said. "That fairy tale
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of his is essentially a claim
that hocus-pocus mumbo
jumbo makes bounding brooks
reverse their course...."
Now, I'm all for sorcery and inchantment, also magic formulae; but this stuff about turning into an ass sounds more like
hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo to me, and I'd rather spend the next few hundred pages with someone who calls a spade a
spade. Ruden's translation strips away the Verilys and Formulae, and restores Apuleius's artistic pedigree. Which, it
turns out, <
Library, an online compendium of digital books:
Ralph Nader Librarian's Note:
You're an ass if you read this
book with anything but scorn
for the rampant sadism, misogyny,
pornography, homosexuality
and superstitious
ideas presented herein under
the guise of "amusing gossip."
This is terrorism in literature,
a story of female sacrifice and
hell on earth made into a "classic."
You want to know what
magic is? It's the "art" of making
women into witches, and
the world into a charnel
ground.
If that doesn't make you want to read Apuleius, nothing will.
Ruden is a renowned American poet and classicist, a Guggenheim fellow whose previous translations include
Lysistrata, Satyricon , the Homeric Hymns, and the Aeneid. In her introduction to The Golden Ass , she's unusually
honest about the challenges of translating Apuleius, the "outlaw genius": "I was inclined to think of the project I had
pursued so determinedly as a long torture session forcing me to confess my hopeless lack of skill and the relative
poverty and joylessness of the literary culture in which I had been raised."
Fortunately, like the heroine of "Cupid and Psyche," the very long tale that's the centerpiece of The Golden Ass , Ruden
receives help from unexpected sources: P. G. Wodehouse, Dave Barry, and Damon Runyon, among others she
acknowledges. (She doesn't mention Bugs Bunny, but I was also reminded of "Roman-Legion Hare.")
This hodgepodge of narrative voices and literary influences perfectly suits a book that is itself a gallimaufry of tales
within tales. The framing story is told by Lucius, our narrator, a hapless young man who, like Pinocchio (another
innocent who did time as a donkey) takes up with unreliable companions in the road. One, Aristomenes, gives an
account of some outrageous hocus-pocus mumbo-jumbo, involving Socrates and a witch who turns a man into a beaver.
Lucius, enthralled, berates their other companion for doubting the truth of the tale. "If you inquired in a little more
detail, you'd find that these [magical] things are not only authenticated on the evidence but actually easy to do."
A short while later, Lucius happily finds himself in a city in Thessaly, the birthplace of witchcraft, where he wanders
about, alert to any hint of magic--he is eager to become a witch himself. He meets and enthusiastically beds Photis, a
slave girl (judging from Lucius's obsession with her hair, Apuleius may have been a trichophiliac); hears a creepy tale
of necromancy involving a shape-changing weasel and the loss of a nose and ears; and is the victim of a diabolically
cruel and gross practical joke. Ah, another holiday in the ancient world!
But everything goes pear-shaped when Photis invites her lover to watch furtively as her mistress, a witch, smears
herself with an ointment and turns into an owl. Gobsmacked, Lucius begs Photis to steal some of the magical ointment
so he too can fly, though he has the presence of mind to make sure there's an antidote. Photis assures him there is. "You
mix a bit of dill with bay leaves, steep the stuff in fresh water, and apply it internally and externally." Noted.
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You know what happens next: The magic goes awry; Lucius turns into an ass and is promptly stolen by bandits who
kidnap a young bride. So begin his woeful misadventures, which are interspersed with other tales. These include
"Cupid and Psyche," recounted in unexpectedly flowery terms by an old woman who's in cahoots with the bandits (she
tells it to calm their hysterical kidnap victim). Other stories, involving adulterous, lascivious and murderous wives,
became sources for Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales .
The Golden Ass ends with another famous setpiece, where Lucius's prayers to the Great Goddess are answered. He
invokes her by various names--Venus, Proserpina, Ceres. When she appears, she goes through a list of her other
monikers--Minerva, Diana, Juno, Hecate, and so on, before revealing her true name, Isis, and commanding Lucius to
take part in her rituals. He does, first as an ass; then, after Isis transforms him, as a man who is promptly given a fiveyear
term on the board of what sounds like a Masonic Lodge. Scholars debate whether this is a satirical description of
an initiation into a mystery cult or an eyewitness account. Either way, it makes for an eye-popping finale, and the last
line of Ruden's wonderful translation provides a glimpse of our hero cheerfully embracing his new administrative
duties: "I did not cloak or conceal my baldness, where I went and whomever I met."
Another adaptation of a well-known text is Hope Larson's graphic novel version of A Wrinkle in Time , a book which I
did not think was begging for illustration, or even for new cover art. My first exposure to Madeleine L'Engle's classic
was the original 1962 edition, with Ellen Raskin's Time Tunnel image, an abstract evocation of the story's characters
and themes. Since then, I've never cared for the literal depictions on later editions of the book, even Leo and Diane
Dillon's. Part of this is the eternal problem of seeing well-known fictional characters brought to life: No matter how
talented the artist or actor, every reader or viewer has her own singular vision of a beloved character, and it's impossible
to please us all, (1) especially if a novel's major players include those named Mrs. Who, Mrs. What sit, and Mrs.
Which. Part of it is the challenge of illustrating a scene like this:
Meg looked around her,
realizing that she had been so
breathless from the journey
and the stop on the two-dimensional
planet that she had
not noticed her surroundings.
And perhaps this was not very
surprising, for the main thing
about the surroundings was
that they were
unnoticeable.
They seemed to be standing
on some sort of nondescript,
flat surface. The air around
them was gray. It was not exactly
fog, but they could see
nothing through it. Visibility
was limited to the nicely definite
bodies of Charles Wallace
and Calvin, the rather unbelievable
bodies of Mrs.
Whatsit and Mrs. Who, and a
faint occasional glimmer that
was Mrs. Which.
But mostly, I think, it's that Meg and Charles Wallace and the rest of the Murry clan are so familiar to many of us that
we feel as though they grew up next door. Meg isn't an avatar of banal wish-fulfillment, like Twilight 's beautiful,
insipid Bella; she's a stand-in for all those socially awkward smart girls who get bullied at school for not being pretty or
docile enough. And while A Wrinkle in Time has a third-person narrative, it's filtered through Meg's Everygirl. Any
attempt to portray her on the page or screen invites myriad readers to stare at the image and bluntly state, That's not me
.
Hope Larson's intentions are honorable--she's one of the contributors to Geektastic: Stories of the Nerd Herd , and has
written and illustrated her own graphic novels and comics. But her palette--the industrial blue of styrofoam insulation,
inky black--is dreary. And the renditions of L'Engle's characters resemble, well, cartoon characters. Mrs. Who looks
like Yubaba, the witch in Spirited Away . Mrs. Whatsit's transformation into a seraphic centaur is far better left to the
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imagination. And Meg's brother Charles Wallace, the five-year-old savant, looks creepily out of place, as if he'd
wandered over from John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos . Surprisingly, the most effective scenes are those that
picture Meg's inter-dimensional travel, where the spare black panels give off a nice sense of the solitude and grandeur
of deep space.
Still, none of the images is as elegant or thrilling as those in the original text which illustrate the principles of time
travel via tesser-act. And any number of busy pictures can't do justice to the power of L'Engle's simple prose, which in
the course of a not-very-long book manages to summon up "love and love ... so tangible that Meg felt that if she only
knew where to reach she could touch it with her bare hands."
Wish fulfillment and inter-dimensional travel of a different sort are the stuff of Ned Vizzini's funny, sweet-natured new
YA novel, The Other Normals . Vizzini's earlier novels are the bestselling It's Kind of a Funny Story , about a suicidal
teenage boy who checks himself into psychiatric hospital, and Be More Chill , about a geeky kid who finds a pill that
makes him cool. The Other Normals features another of Vizzini's bright glum things, Brooklynite Perry (for Peregrine)
Eckert, who at fifteen has still not sprouted body hair or kissed a girl, and--I know this will come as a shock to many of
you--spends much of his free time playing a game called Creatures and Caverns. A trip to Phantom Galaxy Comics, "a
three-story nerd mother ship," to get an expansion pack for C & C nets Perry a mysterious volume--the Creatures and
Caverns Rule Book: Other Normal Edition . Sam, the boy who hands the book on to Perry, is a fellow gainer who has
an admirable philosophy he also shares with Perry:
"Whatever else I do during
the day, I always make
sure to remember, 'Nobody
knows how the pyramids were
built.'... Aliens, magic ... Until
someone explains the pyramids
to me, how'm I gonna
take life serious? You want to
start a new game?"
Most of the parents I know would be overjoyed if their fifteen-year-olds played C&C, rather than watching internet
porn or updating their Facebook status from Single to Drunk. But, concerned about his involvement with the game,
Perry's folks pack him off to Camp Washiska Lake, undeterred by a sign at its entrance that reads NO LAWYERS
BEYOND THIS POINT. Before Perry can even unpack in his yurt, he gets into a fight with a gangleader named Ryu,
pops him in the temple, and gets clocked for his efforts. Not long after he comes to, he finds himself face to face with
Mortin Enaw, one of the denizens of the world where Caverns and Creatures is set, Enthral Moor. Mortin teaches Perry
about the multiverse: how there are multiple versions of the same world, and correspondences between Perry's world
and Enthral Moor: events, individuals, good guys, and bad guys. To save the good guys in Enthral Moor, Perry must
kiss a fellow camper whose correspondent is a princess there. But first, he has to deal with the various weirdnesses that
come with traveling between worlds, like introducing himself to a version of the bully Ryu in Enthral Moor.
"I'm from New York.
Brooklyn. Well. My parents
are divorced--"
Ryu ignores my hand but
perks up at the word Brooklyn
.
"Do you know the Beastie
Boys?" he asks.
"Uh ... I know some of
their videos."
"You don't know them
personally?"
"No."
"Then what do I need you
for? You two carry on; send
him back."
It's all very silly and highly amusing, though the stakes are high enough that blood is shed and some tentacles lopped
off, Perry eventually grows some body hair, and somebody gets kissed. By the time I finished reading The Other
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Normals , I had the distinct feeling that there might be a mysterious, perhaps inexplicable correspondences between
Ned Vizzini's work and that of another master of the absurd, Daniel Pinkwater, especially the sublime ridiculousness of
Pinkwater's Borgel . And until someone explains that to me, or Ned Vizzini writes another captivating novel, how am I
gonna take life serious?
(1) Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn is the exception to this rule.
Hand, Elizabeth
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hand, Elizabeth. "The Golden Ass." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May-June 2013, p. 41+. General
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